In Germany, on the contrary, the intellectual wants of the people and of the educated classes had already manifested themselves very differently. Twelve years before, the age of pamphlets had there commenced. The thoughts of Luther and of his disciples, as also of his opposers were winged by the rapid press, and the people took an impassioned part in the endeavours of the learned to affect their conviction, and by this altogether novel and authoritative mode of religious instruction, became gradually educated and guided. Hence it is not to be wondered at that people began to investigate, in pamphlets, other important subjects likewise, and thus we see this weighty branch of intellectual commerce, with all its advantages and defects, also turned towards the discussion of popular diseases, and for the first time unfolding its numerous leaves on the subject of the English epidemic. In the maritime cities nothing of this kind happened, because the eruption of the pestilence took them by surprise, and as it was over again in the course of a few weeks, it seemed no longer worth while to instruct the people respecting it. This surprise was very plainly shewn in the answer of the doctors and licentiates who were assembled together at the bedside of the Duchess, at Stettin: “the disease was new and unknown to them: they were at a loss what to advise, excepting strengthening medicines.”[650] In the central parts of Germany, on the contrary, where, as early as the month of August, the report of the new plague had excited the utmost alarm, and where an eruption of the pestilence in Zwickau had caused a general flight, publications on the Sweating Sickness were even within that month, and still more numerously in September, disseminated in all directions. As scientific productions, they are almost all of them worthless. Many of them, indeed, did harm, and but very few promulgated correct views. Most of them are now lost, as, for example, that which was published by the printer Frantz, at Zwickau, on the 3rd of September: but in what vast numbers they were published appears from the circumstance that Dr. Bayer, at Leipzig, who brought out his own on the 4th of September, states that he has read many of them, and expresses his indignation against these “new unfounded little books,” by which the people were misled to their own sorrow and suffering[651]. This same Dr. Bayer writes in the style of an intelligent practical physician, inveighs boldly against the prejudices of mankind, and the ignorance of medical _journeymen_, and against their senseless bleedings whenever they see the barber’s basin and his pole. Some of his advice too is not bad, especially where he is speaking of the Arabian use of harmless syrups. He, however, religiously preserves all the rubbish of his age, and has a great opinion of preventive bleedings, purgatives, and powerful medicines, of which he prescribes so many that his reader is necessarily confused by their multiplicity.